A nontraditional sport has unexpectedly worked its way into a number of inner-city neighborhoods nationwide.

Over the past decade, a string of urban squash programs have been popping up across the country, in hopes of helping underprivileged students develop better exercise skills and providing academic assistance.

“They were like, [it’s] squash,” Sakora Miller told AP, reminiscing on her introduction to the racquetball-like sport years ago in seventh-grade. SquashSmarts, a Philadelphia after-school program, had been visiting Miller’s gym class to recruit students to try-out the alien-sounding sport.

“I was like, I’m not learning that,” said Miller. “It’s not for me.”

Still, she decided to try out the new sport and proved to have a knack for squash. Fast forward to 2014, where the 23-year-old upcoming Penn State graduate has just been hired as squash director.

On a mission to “[give] kids their best shot,” SquashSmarts and 14 additional programs in cities like Baltimore, Bronx, Harlem, Oakland and Chicago serve about 1,400 students and boast a combined annual budget of more than $7 million. Plans to expand programming to Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Hartford, Conn. and Cartagena Colombia are currently in the works.

Due to the foreign nature of squash in urban neighborhoods, a number of students have no qualms about rejecting the sport at first glance. Like Miller, current SquashSmarts participant Joshua Smith was reportedly skeptical about the joining.